How Privacy Sits At the Heart of Apple's New AirTags

After years of rumors, Apple finally unveiled AirTags at its ‘Spring Loaded’ event on Tuesday. Fast Company looked at how privacy sits at the heart of the new product.

“When it came to designing our own product, we thought carefully about how to get this right in a way that no one else in the industry’s ever done before,” says Kaiann Drance, Apple’s VP of worldwide iPhone product marketing. I spoke to her and Ron Huang, the company’s senior director of sensing and connectivity, about Apple’s newest, tiniest gadget. “You’ll see that we designed for the privacy of AirTag owners and nonowners, as well as making these benefits opened up to third-party products as well.” And from a privacy standpoint, that’s what’s really remarkable about the AirTag: Apple isn’t just thinking about the privacy of AirTag owners themselves, or even solely about users in Apple’s ecosystem. The company designed the AirTag with the privacy of everyone in mind—yes, even Android users and people who have never owned an Apple product.

This App Can Load Your Business Card into Apple Wallet

An app I discovered a while back called Social Card lets you put your business card into Apple Wallet. By that I mean the app helps you create a personalized card where you can add information like email, phone numbers, websites, and links to social media like LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and others. You can share you card with Airdrop, iMessage, email, or a QR code. You can create a card for free with limited options, and various in-app purchases gives you customization options to add a background, change the color, add a logo or your portrait, and more.

Here’s How Signal Broke Into Cellebrite’s Hacking Device

Moxie Marlinspike of Signal wrote on Wednesday how he was able hack into a Cellebrite device. These devices are used by entities like law enforcement to brute force their way into devices like iPhones.

Given the number of opportunities present, we found that it’s possible to execute arbitrary code on a Cellebrite machine simply by including a specially formatted but otherwise innocuous file in any app on a device that is subsequently plugged into Cellebrite and scanned. There are virtually no limits on the code that can be executed.

A fascinating write-up. One can only imagine the thrill of taking a walk, seeing a package fall out of a truck, and finding out that it’s a Cellebrite device.